He had kept their mother alive in their thoughts. Too alive, perhaps. Someone once said that a woman’s greatest tragedy is that they end up like their mothers, and a man’s is they never do. Well, he had proven exception to the rule.
The words came out like a sputtering stream of bile. “Why would you do a thing like that?” “Why can’t you just do it right?” “Haven’t you any sense?” Hurtling at the teary-eyed eight-year-old whose crime he had forgotten.
“Oh, my god. I’m just like my mother,” he thought as the boy’s face turned red. “This wasn’t him, it’s her.” A convenient lie to shift blame to the dead and dying.
Perhaps thinking about someone caused them to graft into your subconscious. And the more you thought about them, the more like them you became. Six years since they’d lowered the coffin, six years waking up and thinking that she wasn’t there, six years of steady invasion. He was like a zombie possessed by his own mother. Do zombies get possessed? A ghost then. No ghosts are the ones that do the possessing. A cyberman?
It didn’t matter.
It wasn’t that she had been bad. She loved him, in her own way. There were fond memories of ice creams after football matches and gentle kisses on his sweaty forehead when he was ill. But beneath her gentle shell, there was a storm that crackled to the surface all too quickly.
He’d promised himself it wouldn’t happen. That he would be a better parent. But sometimes children were exhausting. They pushed and pushed and pushed until you snapped and shouted at them and then they cried like babies. They are babies. It’s not their fault. A child is supposed to be annoying. And a parent is supposed to be patient. Quite a Catch-22.
Sighing, he rose from his chair. His back creaked as he rose. He was only 35, when did he get so old?
Cautiously he crept toward the door adorned with scribbles. The sign had been turned to say “No Parents” with a comical drawing of a monster that broke his heart. “Is that supposed to be me?” he thought. No, I’m the fun parent. The one that thinks of all the best games and lets them stay up late to eat sweets and watch movies.
He pushed the door open and saw the eight-year-old huddled on the bed. His shuddering shoulders showed that he was still crying.
The door creaked as he entered and the boy looked up. He gave an apologetic smile and sat on the bed next to him.
He thought of his own mother. How many times he had looked up to her like this, pleading eyes confused at the injustice.
He took the boy’s hand and squeezed it. This was it. The time to break the cycle. To prove to himself that he was better.
“It’s ok,” he said, knowing that he had failed. “I forgive you.”
In his heart, he sighed, “Oh my god, I’m just like my mother.”
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